Making Up Is Hard to Do

A postscript on family structure: One thing children lose when their parents divorce, break up, or fester in an unhappy marriage is the opportunity to learn how fighting leads to reconciliation and forgiveness.

Kids in an intact marriage learn that serious disagreements, temper outbursts, and character flaws aren’t insoluble. We learn how to apologize and adapt by watching our parents, and we can bring those skills into later relationships, both marriage and friendship. People from disrupted families and those from intact marriages where little visible effort was made on either side to improve things have, from what I can see, a much harder time struggling to hope and trust when relationships are stressed and the other person is acting badly.

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11 Responses to Making Up Is Hard to Do

“One thing children lose when their parents divorce, break up, or fester in an unhappy marriage is the opportunity to learn how fighting leads to reconciliation and forgiveness.”

Wait a minute Eve, this seems to me to miss the far far greater and indeed fundamental problem of what’s gone big-time wrong with domestic relationships.

This comment of yours sort of suggests that the best solution is to somehow instill more fortitude on the part of people to stay together working out their situations.

Okay, I say, sure, great, esp. when you have a kid or kids, you damned right that fortitude ought to be there.

But, in my opinion at least, the logically prior *and* gob-smackingly better and easier to accomplish solution is persuading that … way too people are getting married way too bloody casually. (Which usually means too early.)

That … the average person’s life has just changed from 50 years ago when the norm was getting married early, and that change not surprisingly affects the marriage situation.

Now … which solution to the problem do you think is more susceptible of seeing success? And better success? (I.e., without *first* producing children?) Arguing fortitude, or for kids to stop getting married so damned casually?

Even aside from paying for the bloody gifts I’ve got to buy and lug to such weddings it makes me just wince now going to these damn things of early or even mid-20-Somethings. What in the living hell do such kids know—no matter *what* they’ve seen from their own parents—of commitments in *general,* much less the commitment they are supposedly making thereby? Of the sacrifices and burdens they are agreeing to?

How, indeed, can anyone even *expect* them to know at that age? Instead it’s like “oh, we’ll just count on a miracle occurring and they’ll get it.”

You go to enough of these things—and then of course hear of the inevitable divorces of the majority in five years or less—and no … no longer do you find it pleasant to see all the money spent on all the clothes and photographers and churches and reception halls and ice-swans and etc., and all the goofy happiness. And yes, you hit the open-bar events with an especial feeling of compensation.

But no, no longer do you find it pleasant to think about the beauty of young love. Instead you become a curmudgeon and think “Jesus, in the name and image of cheap, shallow conceptions of love—horrifyingly accompanied with the playing of some utterly pathetic pop song a la Paul Stookey—all these people including not just the couple but the parents who ought to know better and the aunts and uncles and etc. have let their brains fall out their asses.”

Not really knocking these kids at all or their parents, because young couples *are* so wonderful to see, and because to parents their kids *do* seem so grounded and wonderful and different from all others. And that’s cool. But still … yikes.

Absent extraordinary circumstances, if I had a daughter who announced she wanted to get married before she got to be age 30 I would have considered my intellectual instructing of her to have been a pretty bad failure. (Although I’m sure that in the real world, when she came to me with the news and she was only 25 I’d say “oh but she’s so much smarter than others her age I’m sure it’s okay….)

And I *would* direct most of my ire at early marriages at the parents of the young brides. *They* are the ones who are gonna suffer far more if things go the typical route (kids) and then go pear-shaped with a divorce.

That however still leaves plenty of ire—or expectation or whatever—still directed at parents and esp. fathers of too-young men wanting to get married though. Again excepting the unusually mature kid—which of course everyone thinks they have but ought to know better—instead of gay shouts of “congratulations son!,” those boys in the main ought to be damn near literally put up against the wall by their fathers: “Son, I sure hope you know what you are doing because even if you just break that girl’s heart, but especially if you have kids and then try to bail, you ain’t getting my admiration. So you better sit down and ask what the hell the great problem is in just freaking waiting for a few years.”

Marriage for marriage’s sake is meaningless, Eve. Sure, lessons can be learned from same. But it’s a helluva lot better learning it from a distance, abstractly, from others’ examples, rather than learning by putting one’s hand into the meat grinder.

TomB, you’ve already won. Parents already impose very strong pressures on their children not to marry “too early.” Age at first marriage has been rising for a while. I’d argue that we tried your remedy and it didn’t work, for a whole lot of reasons (extended adolescence and the idea that you need to “find yourself” before you marry, a cultural norm of premarital sex, etc).

But my point in this post was more that seeing examples of serious disagreement and reconciliation is a benefit of marriage which we often overlook. We think of parental conflict as purely negative (and something which some single parents can escape) but depending on HOW parents fight and make up it can be a positive as well. And therefore if you didn’t see this kind of reconciliation in your own family it might be a good idea to explicitly seek mentoring or look for models of it elsewhere.

Or, to go to a higher level of abstraction, a) structural solutions often turn out to be easy for the preexisting culture to ooze past, whereas harder and weirder solutions which focus on cultural attitudes address the roots of the problem;

and b) obvious solutions are often obvious because they play into the preexisting culture, in ways which make them easy for that culture to co-opt.

TomB–
I’m quite insulted by your insinuation that women who get married early won’t feel fulfilled or will somehow not have enough assertiveness to still have great person success (in whatever way they desire). I got married a few years ago just shy of 22 years old. We have been able to save together, grow together, and travel together. There is NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING, wrong about young marriage if it is done right. We had a strong family backing and went into it with our eyes open. We discovered our differences before marriage, even going through the process of finding a church denomination together (we came from different Protestant backgrounds).
We are waiting a few years to have children because we both desire to be emotionally and financially stable.
I really believe you missed the point of this article. People WILLINGLY enter marriages… this means they need the desire to STAY in these marriages. Please don’t make a blanket statement about early marriages. It’s insulting and not reflective of actual experiences— please read the statistics carefully. The “young marriage” divorce rate comes from teenage marriage– if the statistics of 21-25 years olds are looked at separately, it becomes no more likely that you’ll divorce and your marriage will actually be happier.

My parents, grandparents, and sister all married around the age of twenty. None of them approached the commitment casually. They have all sacrificed in the midst of financial trials, personality conflicts, and difficult parenting situations in order to stay together. Ask any of them if they made the correct decision, marrying at a young age, and they will explain that they feel bad for all those confused kids who spend their twenties sleeping around. Promiscuous couples will not understand intimacy in the same way as the truly monogamous. My parents, in fact, say that the most trying part of their relationship was when they were engaged and could only spend their weekends together.

Those couples who share more experiences, more history, more friendships, and transcend more trials together are, in many ways, more intimately connected than those who share their bodies and love with more partners. Move in together and see if it works. Date around during your twenties. This sort of advice leads to secular European norms that as a general rule do not promote stronger and more rooted families. Earlier generations, born into a more Christian culture, respected the ideal of chastity to a far greater degree than couples in our culture. They were also married at a younger age and the divorce rate was much lower.

Even if statistics show that younger couples centrally tend to have less success than those who marry at an older age, who is to say that age is the causal factor here. Considering the fact that other cultures and other generations married younger and had higher success rates, it could be that there are other moral, spiritual, and systemic disorders undermining lifelong commitment in corporate state welfare societies.

Hello Eve. And thank you so much for your response to my post. As regards same then you wrote:

“TomB you’ve already won.”

Not by enough, Eve!

“Parents already impose very strong pressures on their children not to marry “too early.”

Again, not enough! The average age of first marriage for women per our latest census figures is only about 26 years of age. Being the average, meaning 1/2 of all are aged 26 all the way up to the latest age of death, this also means that a full 1/2 getting married are from age 16 or so to age 25. And *that* means there’s an absolute *ton* of women out there age 18, 19, 20, 21 and etc. getting married—the very core of the ones I worry about and don’t want to see getting married. A veritable *ton.*

“Age at first marriage has been rising for a while.”

Oh, for a long time. Average age for women in 1950 was at 20. And given its correlation with the *falling* rate of divorces in fact it tends to argue my point that the older the couple marrying the less the incidence of divorce. But that don’t mean the ages have risen *enough* of course, so let’s continue.

“I’d argue that we tried your remedy and it didn’t work.”

Well but you already conceded I “won,” Eve, by noting that parents *are* putting pressure on kids not to marry early—no doubt *because* they agree that getting married too early is dangerous.

Of all our first marriage divorces a full 27.6% were the result of crashed marriages entered into when the woman involved was under age 20.

Of all such divorces a whopping 36.6% were the result of crashed marriages entered into when the woman involved was between 20 and 24 years of age.

And then of all divorces 16.9% were the result of crashed marriages entered into when the woman involved was between the ages of 25 and 29.

And so, added up, that’s a gob-smackingly huge percent of all first-marriage divorces.

Needless to say then, Eve, I don’t even know that it’s even necessary to say it’s an argument anymore: You want to see a tremendous plunge in the divorce rate? Urge even more kids to wait until they are older. Not that there’s anything wrong with your telling newlyweds to get more fortitude, but statistics I think clearly point to where, by far, we’d get the most bear for our buck. Or as Willie Sutton might put it, you want to to *really* stamp down the divorce rate? Go to the marriages where the divorces are.

(And as to your “higher level of abstraction” argument while I thought it was so extraordinarily smart I was surprised at how weak its effect must be in light of the statistics. And of course abstractions just simply must give way to reality.)

This said, I once again acknowledge that not only were your initial words here focused on just making an observation about one upside of marriage
, but affirm that same was indeed a particularly fine, subtle and damn-well needed observation on your part too.

@ SER who said:

“I’m quite insulted by your insinuation that women who get married early won’t feel fulfilled or will somehow not have enough assertiveness to still have great person success (in whatever way they desire). I got married a few years ago just shy of 22 years old. … There is NOTHING, I repeat, NOTHING, wrong about young marriage if it is done right. … The “young marriage” divorce rate comes from teenage marriage– if the statistics of 21-25 years olds are looked at separately, it becomes no more likely that you’ll divorce and your marriage will actually be happier.”

Well, SER, given that I didn’t say or insinuate that in the least, and given that on more than one occasion I clearly indicated I was speaking generally as to what I *was* saying, and given that you understand what that means given *your* talking generally (“if it is done right”), and given the (also of course general) statistic you hoped were true in light of the real ones that I have dug up … well I just don’t give a rat’s ass about you feeling insulted.

You’re obviously a good enough writer and thinker to genuinely contribute, so it would be a shame if you decided instead to join the herd of modern outrage mongers out there dishonestly and polemically alleging perceived “insults all the time,” betraying both their shallowness, need for attention, and their juvenile sense of having the right to never be insulted in life.

So go back and read my original post again, slowly, and at the very worst you’ll see that if indeed your (ahem, so far very short) marriage lasts that the absolute worst thing I said about you is that you will be one of the “extraordinary, unusually mature” cases. And even if your marriage does *not* last you’ll see that all I say is that you are just as blindable by love as your age cohort is, which in fact is a lovely, but problematic thing, period. So no insult to you whatsoever, young lady, and by the way congratulations and good luck to you and your spouse.

@ Ben Nagle, who wrote:

“Even if statistics show that younger couples centrally tend to have less success than those who marry at an older age, who is to say that age is the causal factor here.”

Well of course it’s not age per se, Ben, but looking at the statistics I recited above it seems to me impossible to deny that the *incidents* of age—*in the modern generations*—must have *something* huge to do with it, no?

That is, I have no doubt whatsoever that if you could transplant the moral, spiritual, intellectual and other incidents of age of some generations gone by into our present ones our present statistics would be radically different.

And I am the last to not *want* to transplant them.

I just think that there’s some small reasons to not as a sole matter focus on that transplantation, and to very much recognize the realities of *today’s* incidents of youth and urge them to marry later. And that’s because those small reasons are all the kids being born into soon-to-be families of divorce and who could otherwise be born into families of no divorce.

Not in the least (for the outrage mongers out there) implying that there’s anything wrong or deficient with kids coming from families of divorce. That’s just stupid. (And maybe even topsy-turvy.) Just that it would probably be happier if fewer or no kids had to see their parents go through divorce.

SER–As I understand it the stats on “early” marriage are somewhat different from what you suggest. Premarital Sex in America said, IIRC, that for men marital stability doesn’t change once you get out of your teens (= if you’re a man and marry in your teens that’s statistically correlated with divorce, but as long as you wait until you’re 21, waiting longer doesn’t help you more).

For women the BIG jump in marital stability comes when you leave the teen years but their marital stability rates do continue to increase slightly up through, if memory serves, the late twenties. Sorry if this is hard to understand–I’m super tired! I wrote more (and more clearly) on this stuff here.

But to return to our muttons, my point with this post was that while some losses experienced by children from disrupted family structures are really obvious, others are harder to see. But once we see them we can begin to compensate for them. Conversely if we DON’T acknowledge the losses, or cast things as unambiguously positive (“at least I never had to see my parents fight”) when the reality is more complex, we can’t make up for what we may have missed.

Oh ps, SER’s “your marriage will be happier” point may be true in the sense that those who marry at those ages did self-report the greatest happiness in a survey cited, again, in Premarital Sex in America. I make no claims about correlation vs causation there.

TomB, sorry, our posts seem to have crossed in the mail! And thanks v much for the kind words. Anyway I think we disagree in part bc we see different possible alternatives and that leads us to identify different problems and solutions. You’re saying, “Better to marry at 29 than 19,” and I agree. (I have not churned through the divorce-risk-correlation stats myself and am not sure which dataset is best, but I think we can agree on that much.)

But there’s a third alternative: Don’t marry at all. As we’ve developed a cultural norm that marriage is the frosting on life’s cake, the reward you get when you’ve finally become personally and economically stable, rather than the foundation for a stable family, far fewer people reach that final stage of adulthood at all. That’s how we end up with a falling divorce rate AND a rising percentage of children raised without both parents. The situation isn’t marriage vs. divorce, where the problem we’re trying to solve is divorce. The situation is marriage vs. family breakup, which is increasing even as divorce is decreasing.

(This is what I meant when I said the culture can ooze around structural solutions. Nobody’s going to force you into the marriage structure, so if you make changes to that structure which don’t address the underlying cultural attitudes, people will opt out of the structure. See also: covenant marriage.)

I’d argue that the rising age of marriage does work, for the people who end up getting married (although raise it too far and you run into fertility problems, especially when the wife has a demanding career), but the underlying cultural mindset of marriage as reward for adulthood rather than foundation doesn’t work for most people. Changing that mindset (and helping “emerging adults” emerge faster!) will require accepting and supporting earlier marriages, but that’s more a symptom of positive change than a cause. (And I should have been a LOT clearer about that myself! This is a topic which breeds defensiveness, apparently.)

You know Eve, I think that’s just the keenest thinking possible when you talk about … what marriage is *meaning* to people today, with that of course playing a simply huge part of the equation.

*BUT*, notice something: Because I think that when you *first* talked about what it means to young people today it was different from when you mentioned the subject again later.

When you *first* mentioned it that is (negatively), you talked about how our cultural norm today is the concept of “marriage [as] the frosting on life’s case, the reward you get when you’ve finally become personally and economically stable, rather than the *foundation* for a stable family.”

And I was ready to say … what’s all that wrong with that? That, to a *very* goodly degree today, you *should* have first stabilized your life to a considerable degree, because so many of the demands of marriage tend to *limit* your ability to so afterwards. (You’re not as mobile, you don’t have the time you had before to devote to your job or your hobbies or dreams, and in general just can’t explore your potential as much. You are, in a big sense, utterly undeveloped, and don’t even know yourself.)

But then later you talked about the “underlying cultural mindset of marriage as reward for adulthood rather than foundation [of adulthood]” … and I wanted to cheer at this formulation:

You *bet* I think this is it: Kids just sort of feeling … “Wow, we reached 20 now, we can shack up legally under the term ‘married’ just like when we reached 18 and could legally drink! What fun!”

So I guess I see a very subtle but important different possible take on the modern young marriage mindset here, while still regarding your focus on that mindset at *all* really really smart. Indeed, it would be interesting for a book to explore and refine just what mindsets *are* predominant in young married today.

And it’s funny too: As much as I can *argue* that the mindset we should encourage is indeed the one that regards marriage as something you should only enter into *after* you’ve established some stability otherwise in your life, I have to admit being a sucker for your argument otherwise given how romantic I think it is.

E.g., I read your description of an early marriage as essentially a wonderful sort of … adventure … of a couple building a life around themselves ab initio, so to speak, and it *is* just so romantic.

And then one reads the words of SER above showing all that wonderful youthful happiness and determination and optimism about going out and building her and her husband’s lives together ab initio, and you can’t help but admire and cheer for them.

So I don’t want to pretend that I’m not conflicted in casting a very very dubious eye on early marriages. And indeed if they *didn’t* produce so many kids of divorce I wouldn’t be dubious about them at all , any moreso than one could be dubious about Romeo and Juliet: What the the world is sweeter to see or experience than young love? What would life be without it?

But there are all those children of early failed marriages, and there are those stats showing how young marriages form the grist for a hugely disproportionate number of all the divorces, and I dunno what to say seeing those other *than* the curmudgeonly “Don’t get married young all you kids!”

(All the while feeling more than a bit guilty for surrendering to the cynicism about life that age gives, and watching an SER get married and working like hell at a young marriage and admiring the hell out of them and cheering them on to beat the odds.)

So what’s right to be, Eve? Sage cynics, who perhaps have seen too much of life? Or hopeless romantics?

In the middle of the day, pondering the “right” social science advice, it’s the odds I can’t ignore.

Give me a drink (or maybe it will take two) at the lovely lambent evening wedding reception of a beautiful young couple, and I’ll say the hell with the damned statistics.

I was delighted surprised to hear that what seems most lacking in successful marriages is the modeling of how actualy intimate relations works: reconciliation, forgiveness, hardwork . . . and I add, sacrifice (selflessness), empathy, etc and perhaps most importantly, fortitude. That the marriage itself has value beyond the individual wants of of either couple — with or without children.

I was surpised, that there was no meantion of vitality of celibacy prior to marriage as to inimacy development. Or how they defined happiness.